Canonical features in the inflectional morphology of Spanish-speaking individuals with agrammatic speech

Abstract

Non-fluent agrammatic speech output, a typical feature of Broca's aphasia, involves marked difficulty using complex verb tenses. This experiment examined the interactional effect among canonical properties of verb inflections in the simple verbs produced by Spanish-speaking individuals with agrammatic speech, based on data derived from a larger corpus. Twelve monolingual Spanish-speaking individuals, six with agrammatic speech and six control speakers, participated in the study. A sentence repetition task was deemed useful for this experiment because it provided clues between overt expressive syntactic abilities and their possible internal grammatical processing. Responses for simple verbs were examined in variable pairings to explore the effect each variable interaction had on the enhancement of verb inflection repetition. Findings showed that participants with agrammatic speech favoured the repetition of structurally simple verb endings associated with early acquired and frequently employed verb forms. These results support the notion that complex inflectional markers may overload processing capabilities of agrammatic speakers for the production of inflectional affixes. Instead, simple verb forms are easier to produce because they involve an enhancing interaction of morphophonological canonical features. Both theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• Agrammatism
• canonical features
• Spanish verbs